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It used to be that non-fiction writers need not apply to appear at the International Festival of Authors – unless they were literary biographers.

But this year's festival, starting today at Harbourfront, has expanded the non-fiction entries available to festival-goers.

Next Friday evening will highlight the Charles Taylor Prize, a literary non-fiction award. Onstage will be authors Charlotte Gray, Larry Gaudet, David Gilmour and Rudy Wiebe, invited specifically for their contributions to the category of non-fiction literature.

For some nervous novelists, this is an omen: literary fiction is slowly losing ground in our culture.

The complaint has been raised from various quarters in recent years. An April 2005 article in the Australian Book Review complained that "literary fiction is losing market share to memoirs and genre fiction." The Sept. 10 Publishers Weekly repeated the phrase "literary fiction has lost its authority in the culture," often heard in publishing industry circles.

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"(People) are less comfortable with novels," John Updike said in an interview, after the dismal sales of his 2000 novel Gertrude and Claudius. "They don't have a backward frame of reference that would enable them to appreciate things like irony and allusions. It's sad."

Asked in a recent interview with the Star about the conditions for literary fiction, Philip Roth commented, "They have deteriorated. There's just no doubt about it .... The status of literature was much higher when I began writing.

"There were a number of serious critics that was much greater than now. The number of serious readers was much greater than now. The number of distractions was much fewer than now.

"The screen has come to dominate. It began with the movie screen, then the television screen and then the computer screen. Against these screens, the printed page doesn't have a chance."

But Geoffrey Taylor, artistic director of the authors' festival, assures readers that the relatively small increase in attention to non-fiction this year is no portent of a decline in literary fiction. "Our focus has been over the years on literary fiction and we're still trying to have that as the core of our program," he says. "But we're trying to be more reflective of what people read. Real readers will read all kinds of things.

"The festival's not like a lifeboat in which you only have a certain number of seats and somebody has to jump overboard to make room for others," he points out. "That's not how we approach the festival program. We're increasing the program overall."

Whether fiction really has lost authority in our culture is a difficult question to answer. The situation is different in Canada and the United States, for one thing. The events of Sept. 11, 2001, dealt a blow to the New York publishing industry from which it has not yet completely recovered. Literacy is also declining in that country.

Owners of independent bookstores in Toronto, specializing more in high-end products, do not agree that literary fiction is on the downswing.

"My gut feeling is that literary fiction is definitely not declining," says J. Frans Donker of Book City. "Sales of it are extremely steady."

But what about those kids and younger adults mesmerized by Roth's "screens"? "Why do we then see so many 25-year-olds in my stores, still buying books?" Donker replies. "I go back to the argument, which I have held for many, many years. It's only a small percentage of the population that are steady book buyers and book readers. The percentage was the same in 1920 and 1950 and 1980 and 2000. The percentage of people who read to their children before going to bed is probably the same."

Ben McNally, of Ben McNally's Books, agrees. "I don't think there's been any lessening of interest in literary fiction over the years." And there is hope in younger readers.

"Meg Cabot is an industry," he says, referring to the highly popular author of The Princess Diaries. "Meg Cabot publishes more books than Danielle Steele. She's not publishing these books for old people."

Then there's the Harry Potter phenomenon.

"One of the things that has cheered me most is the success of Harry Potter," McNally says. "It gives us hope that there is going to be yet another generation that has the same attachment to books and feels the same magic about books, about what books can do for you on a super-realistic level."

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